


On The Clock

by Sunnybone



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Comedy, M/M, Modern AU, Rated T for swears, for once I'm writing Felix suffering instead of Sylvain, minimum wage hell
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-27
Updated: 2020-07-27
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:14:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25541161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sunnybone/pseuds/Sunnybone
Summary: Felix is on shift at his minimum-wage job as a Subway "Sandwich Artisan" when his most regular customer shows up to order a True Abomination In Sandwich Form.Now with an incredible cover art by@lv2nt!
Relationships: Felix Hugo Fraldarius/Sylvain Jose Gautier
Comments: 21
Kudos: 188





	On The Clock

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Birthday FE3H, here is a fic inspired by a twitter thread about what niche AU you might write based on your work experience. It gave me war flashbacks to working at Subway, and I just knew, in my heart, that Felix Had To Suffer.

“Hey, Felix,” drifts over the half-wall that separates Felix and the back of the shop from the front, “you have a customer.”

Felix looks up from the huge plastic tub half-full of sliced onion, stops feeding a whole peeled onion into the torture device that is the multi-purpose slicer, and fixes puffy, red, streaming eyes on Linhardt.

“Why the fuck can’t you take them?” he asks. It’s slow hours, dinner rush over an hour past, and Linhardt is on front while Felix does prep work and restocks their bins. Linhardt looks at him, looks out towards the sandwich line and presumably at the customer, and shrugs. Felix leans to look out over the half-wall and sees a figure facing away—tall, broad shoulders, red hair, and Felix groans.

He slams a plastic lid over the top of the tub of onions, stomps into the walk-in fridge to put it away, because Linhardt sure as hell isn’t going to do the onion prep. Then he comes out front, stands with his hands on his hips as his most persistently regular customer turns and graces him with a grin that has a dimple in the corner, and Felix is charmed but not _that_ fucking charmed.

“What do you want?” he demands, and the resulting laugh is warm and pleased and Felix’s cold, dead, minimum-wage heart does _not_ flutter.

“Rough day, Sunshine?”

Felix reaches up with one crinkly-plastic-gloved hand to adjust his visor. “Are you ordering or not?” Felix does not have the time or patience for this, he has onions to chop and a whole bin of tuna to grind and mix before he clocks out. If he’s lucky, he’ll have time to scrub some bread forms, because, again, god knows Linhardt won’t.

“I’m gonna get two footlongs; you know my regular, right?” He winks, and Felix _does_ know his regular—bacon and egg-white with double provolone on white flatbread, ever since Felix had taken five minutes to bitch about exactly _how_ the tuna was mixed. “One of those, and then something a little more… _adventurous_.”

Felix groans— _adventurous_ in that tone means _a culinary crime against god_. He turns, pulls off his gloves and takes a moment to pat a rough brown paper towel against his eyes, still stinging from onions, before washing his hands and donning fresh gloves. When he finishes and turns, the restaurant is not miraculously empty, and he is still cursed with the fate of finding out what fresh hell _adventurous_ means.

“What kind of bread for this abomination?” he asks as he grabs the flatbread, and earns himself a chuckle.

“I’m thinking the honey-oat.” Felix grabs a footlong of the 9-grain honey-oat and pre-cuts it, then abandons it to work on the reasonable, edible, _fit for human consumption_ breakfast sub. He doesn’t bother asking if it’s toasted, or what toppings go on it—it’s always the same, always simple, just spinach, salt and pepper, and a little of the chipotle ranch. He cuts, wraps, and bags it, and leaves it on the counter by the register to ring up when this ordeal is done. The whole time he works, he’s treated to a warm voice absently joining the radio, singing along low and quiet to The Police’s _Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic_.

Unfortunately, the honey-oat still sits in wait, full of terrible possibility.

“So. What’s going on this,” he interrupts, flatly, and he tries not to cringe at the contemplative hum. Felix _knows_ that hum; it precedes the kind of sandwich that should be classified as a war crime.

“How about a double meatball…” Felix’s fingers flex in their stupid crinkly gloves, because meatball subs are bad enough without making it a double and daring the structural integrity of the bread to give out. Felix glances up into brown eyes, catches the laughter in them the second before he adds, “And add tuna.”

“No,” Felix says, not so much a refusal as a horrified protest.

“Yeah,” is the response, curling around a smirk, “and I’m gonna need that toasted.” Felix looks into his eyes, sees that he is in fact Dead Serious, and a little piece of his soul shrivels and dies. He slides the bread to the end of the line, where they have the hot containers of meatballs in sauce, and starts spooning out sixteen fucking meatballs into the soon-to-be-soggy embrace of the bread. He slides the sandwich to the middle of the line, turns to grab the rubber tray and big metal scoop that will allow him to put the fledgling monstrosity into the toaster oven, when there’s a noise from across the plexiglass. Felix turns to look over his shoulder. “What about the tuna?”

Felix stands for a moment, bewildered. “You _do not_ want the tuna toasted.”

“I do.”

“But...the _mayonnaise_.”

“ _But_ , the cheese won’t be melty on the tuna.” Felix frowns, but it doesn’t dent the cheerful look he’s being given, and he turns almost mechanically back towards the sandwich. He grabs the ice-cream-scoop they use to measure and drops two scoops of tuna onto the meatballs, one in the center of each half of the sandwich, cringing as he does. He takes the little spatula out of the bin with the knives and gingerly spreads the tuna as best he can, before looking up, in something like supplication—a small prayer for mercy.

“What kind of cheese?”

“The shreddy kind.” Ah, yes, of course. “Extra, please.” _Of course_.

Felix sprinkles an ungodly amount of shredded cheese over the top of the tuna, and then reluctantly puts the fucking sandwich in the fucking oven. He can feel his ancestors crying out, all of humanity stretching back to the caveman who first discovered fire _weeping_ at how Felix has misused their discoveries for evil.

He gags when he pulls it out of the oven, a _farce_ of _food_ , a mass of crisped wheat bread, meatballs, and _hot tuna with mayonnaise_ under globs of molten shredded cheese. He sets the horrorterror onto the counter and stares at it for a moment, seeking strength for the continuance of this ordeal; he’s not fool enough to think this is the end of it.

“What,” Felix asks, slow, looking up, “do you want on this?”

“Lettuce,” he says, starting out with the least offensive, and when Felix has gingerly sprinkled lettuce onto the affront against all that is good, he adds, “and mayonnaise.” God. Mayonnaise is step two. It’ll only get worse from here. Felix breathes deep, grabs the bottle of mayo, squirts one steady line across the lettuce. He looks up like a man awaiting a death sentence, and maybe his utterly broken spirit shows through, maybe god is taking pity on him for this moment of Hell on Earth, because he gets a smile and, “That’s all!”

“That’s it?”

He shouldn’t tempt fate, but, “Yep!” Felix drops the bottle of mayo back with its companions, wrestles the sandwich shut, his shoulders sloping down in relief as he slices the sandwich in half and none of the meatballs make a break for it. “Oh, just, _one_ more thing?” Felix scowls and looks up. “Can you cut that in _four_ pieces?”

Felix’s fingers flex around the handle of the knife, his trust in the existence of human decency and also his patience stretched to the limit. “ _Sylvain_.”

“Yes, Felix?” the bastard has the _audacity_ to answer, sweetly, as though he isn’t torment incarnate.

“You realize I’m about point two seconds from scrambling over the counter and using this bread knife to end you, right?”

“Oh, but Sweetheart,” Sylvain says, leaning against the plexiglass dome and crossing his arms atop it, “who would drive you home at the end of your shift, then?”

He has a fucking point.

“I am _not_ cutting this in four pieces,” Felix answers, moving his shame onto the stack of wrappers and beginning to roll it up, hoping to hide it away from the judgement of god underneath the repeating pattern of the Subway logo.

“I’m just trying to make it easier for Dimitri to eat, Fe.”

Felix yanks off his gloves and begins angrily punching the order into the register. “Firstly, Dimitri will eat it with a knife and fork anyways, and secondly,” he hands Sylvain a cup unprompted and moves to get him two cookies, “you’re not feeding that fucking poison to Dimitri.”

“But he’ll love it!” Sylvain says, accepting the packet of cookies, and Felix keeps a grip on them.

“You’re a monster.”

“You love me, though.”

Again, he has a fucking point.

Sylvain smiles, leans in with the tiniest tug on the cookies. “Ok, I won’t feed it to Dimitri… if you convince me.” He wiggles his eyebrows and smiles, and it’s more goofy than seductive, but damn if the way the corners of his eyes crinkle doesn’t get Felix _every fucking time_.

He reaches up and twists his visor to the side before leaning across the counter to give Sylvain one, _one_ quick kiss, which earns him a pout that just _begs_ to be crushed under his mouth. Felix resists and leans back, readjusting his visor and lifting an eyebrow. “I’m on the clock, Sylvain.” Sylvain sighs, but he straightens up and accepts the cookies as Felix lets go.

“Ok, ok, consider me convinced. Could’ve been a _little_ more thorough, but, I won’t feed this to Dimitri.” He slides the wrapped war crime to Felix and watches him dump it into the trashcan under the register; it’s a waste of what can only _barely_ be called food, but Sylvain’d paid for it with the company card from his father’s firm where he’s interning (until he passes the bar and then he’ll branch out on his own, father be damned) so it’s not like the money matters. Sylvain comes in often enough with the card in tow, ordering horrible shit just to see _how cute your face scrunches up, Sweetheart_. “What am I supposed to do to make sure he eats, though?”

Sylvain makes Dimitri sound like a pet dog instead of a roommate perfectly capable of feeding himself. Well. “Dedue will feed him,” Felix says, turning to wash his hands and put on fresh gloves. He turns and Sylvain is still just standing there in front of the register, packet of cookies and empty cup in hand, sandwich lying on the counter, and Felix sighs. “Will you just go eat? I have onions and _tuna_ to do in the next…” he glances at the clock, “thirty minutes. Quit distracting me or I’m going to clock overtime.”

That gets Sylvain to fuck off, at least as far as one of the tables where they both have a line-of-sight on each other as Sylvain eats his sandwich and Felix chops onions. Linhardt appears from… _wherever_ the fuck he’d been (probably getting fucking blazed in the parking lot) and Felix listens to them chat while he grinds and mixes the tuna; he’s not going to bother with the bread forms, fuck it.

When Caspar finally shows up for his closing shift, Sylvain and Linhardt are debating which of their friends’ height they could eat in Subway sandwiches—Dedue through Hubert are out of the question, but Linhardt is maintaining he could _at least_ manage his own height.

“That’s like, five footlongs and a six inch," Sylvain says, taking a sip of his drink. "Plus some.”

“Alright, then I suppose… I could eat Edelgard.”

“Pff, you’d struggle with _Annette_.”

Caspar looks up warily as he clocks in on the register. “Whoa, whoa, we talking cannibalism, here?” Felix nudges him out of the way to clock out and tunes out the conversation as Linhardt and Sylvain explain, and by the time he has returned from the back with his bag they’ve moved on to something else that Felix also does not give a shit about.

“Prep’s done, but you’ve got bread forms,” he says as he makes his way to the door that will free him into the Customers Only part of the shop, and Caspar groans.

“For real?”

“Take it up with morning shift; Hilda left them for me, and I’m leaving them for you. At least you don’t have to do onions or _tuna_ ,” he throws across the shop as he drops his bag on a table to untie his apron, and Caspar sighs.

“Yeah, I guess. Thanks man, you’re a real one.” Felix looks over, visor dangling from his fingers, but Caspar is completely sincere—he’s never been one for sarcasm, anyways. Felix nods and turns to shove his hat and apron into his bag, he needs to take them home and wash them—

“Hey, Fe,” accompanies the warm winding of a hand and then an arm around his waist, and he looks up at Sylvain, “are you still on the clock?”

“I smell like bread,” he answers, slightly disgusted by the fact, instead of the obvious _no_. Sylvain's eyebrows go up as he leans in, hovering _just_ outside of kissing Felix, and—Felix rolls his eyes, pushes up on his toes just enough to press his mouth to the smile curling across Sylvain's. It's a hell of a lot more _thorough_ than their earlier kiss, and when Felix drops back onto his heels Sylvain is looking at him like he's the best thing Sylvain has ever seen, instead of a very tired and frazzled minimum wage employee in sore need of a shower and a change. Sylvain tucks a bit of Felix's hair behind his ear and Felix hums, "Let's go home."

Laughing, Sylvain whisks him out of the store.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you Lois for [the gorgeous cover](https://twitter.com/lv2nt/status/1306393933401018368) for this joke fic 🥺💖
> 
> After checking the dining hall stats to decide what sandwich would be Sylvain's regular, for accuracy, y'know, I realized most of his favorite meals are fish based. However, I love him too much to have him order a tuna sandwich from Subway.
> 
> I worked at a Subway roughly twelve years ago; here is why I recommend no one ever order the tuna:
> 
> Tuna was prepped by opening huge cans of tuna the size of your head, feeding the chunk tuna through a little grinder that was basically a trough you stuck tuna in and then a very sharp blade spun by a hand crank (also used for prepping onions, cucumbers, and tomatoes), until it spit the smaller ground bits of tuna into a giant plastic tub. When you had your tub full of tuna, you then slit open a gallon bag of mayo—yes, a _gallon. bag._ —and poured that into the tuna...and then mixed it by hand. And I don't mean, manually, with some kind of tool. I mean you dug your poor minimum wage plastic-gloved hands into that tuna and mayonnaise terror and mixed as though making an accursed dough.
> 
> You're welcome.
> 
> Thanks to the Sylvix discord for Eating Your Height In Subs!
> 
> Find me on twitter at [@AceMorningStar](https://twitter.com/AceMorningStar)


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